A Hundred Women

Why has a decade-long string of murders gone unsolved?

Long before her current troubles began, Cynthia Kiecker de Perzábal knew that Mexico had changed her life. When she was growing up, in Minnesota, she vacationed with her family here year after year. When she was a freshman at the University of Minnesota, she told me proudly, she travelled to Mexico City with the college marching band and played her saxophone at Aztec Stadium. In high school, she had wanted to become an actress, but instead, in 1979, after a year of college, she moved to Mexico and studied art in San Miguel de Allende. As she entered adulthood, her sense of what was important in life appears to have changed; she adopted the name Cheyenne and took up a wandering sort of existence, moving from one city to another, from plaza to plaza, selling bead-and-wire jewelry she made. In 1985, at the age of twenty-six, she met a Mexican street musician named Javier Perzábal, who had adopted the name of Ulises; a few months later, she married him, and he began making jewelry, too. Eventually, the couple wound up in Chihuahua City, the capital of Chihuahua, a vast desert state abutting the Rio Grande, whose most famous city is Ciudad Juárez.

A small, wiry woman with long blond hair and clear blue eyes, Kiecker looks lovely in a photograph taken three years ago, fair skin glowing in contrast to that of the handsome Ulises, who has dark skin, piercing Aztec eyes, high cheekbones, and waist-length jet-black hair. Kiecker says that she sees herself as an artesana, a craftsperson, and not as a hippie, which is how conservative-minded Chihuahuenses had grown used to thinking about her and her husband over the years—a weird but inoffensive long-haired hippie couple.

In recent years, the couple’s life seemed to be acquiring greater structure; improved sales of their wares—something to do with the current vogue in shoulder-length earrings, perhaps, or a loosening of Chihuahuan mores—allowed them to move their enterprise off the street and into a curious little slat-board store downtown. The couple also rented a small house on a quiet street in a working-class neighborhood near the center of town, where they had a cordial relationship with neighbors who, like them, are not prosperous enough to have a phone. Chihuahua City is a prim and orderly place, with neatly laid-out streets and parks, well-run public services, and a low crime rate. High temperatures can be a problem, and boredom, too, but the Perzábals liked their house and their livelihood. In general, life was good.

According to the Perzábals, shortly before midnight on May 29th they were at home, working on their jewelry. They had recently received a shipment of new supplies, and Cynthia says that she was sitting in the bedroom with Ulises, admiring a beautiful jade butterfly and imagining an appropriate setting for it, when they heard ferocious shouts and crashing noises at their front door. Within seconds, they saw an axe, or a bludgeon of some sort, break through the door and, behind it, five or six men wearing civilian clothes, all armed with submachine guns. The intruders shoved the couple, kicked them, swore at them, and attempted to gag them with the clothes lying around the room. Ulises says that he tried to protect Cynthia, but he was thrown to the floor and immobilized almost immediately. Cynthia, panic-stricken, was shoved into a waiting van; Ulises was dragged out by the hair and dumped into the back of a pickup truck. Cynthia struggled to breathe after the men placed a sack made of some sort of plastic over her head. She heard a neighbor try to deter their abduction by shouting, “I’m videotaping you!” (a bluff, she assumes), and then the couple were taken to a place they subsequently identified as the former Chihuahua State Police Academy.

No one knew where they were. By their account, they were held in adjoining rooms and were kicked, beaten, and tortured for the next forty-eight hours. In the end, they signed documents confessing to the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Viviana Rayas, the daughter of a prominent local labor leader. Willy-nilly, the Perzábals were now leading characters in the most shameful human-rights scandal in Mexico’s recent history: a string of brutal killings of young women which came to be called the Juárez murders, because they seemed to be confined—in the public imagination, at least—to one seedy border town.

A graceless, sprawling city more than two hundred miles north of Chihuahua City, Juárez is as garish as the capital is straitlaced. There are highways, fast-food stops, drab shopping malls, a couple of parks, and, everywhere, the yonkes—junk yards—where mountains of battered cars are piled so high on either side of the road that one seems to be driving through a canyon. In winter, the plywood-and-corrugated-plastic shacks on the outskirts provide no shelter from the frost. In summer, the heat melts the asphalt. The cheesy night clubs and topless bars along the main highways are where Stateside boys go when they come over from neighboring El Paso to get wasted.

The rootless nature of Juárez is like a mold in the atmosphere. About half of its million and a half residents came from their native towns and villages sometime in the last quarter century, looking for work in the foreign assembly plants known as maquiladoras. The uprooted immigrants live in sullen shantytowns—where a high number of households are presided over by unmarried, divorced, or abandoned women—and seem to have lost the essential inner compass that points back home. In the early nineteen-nineties, the international drug cartels decided that Juárez, with its border location, its table-dance joints, and its floating population, was a good place for an outpost. Within a few years, and as the violence that accompanied the drug racket escalated, people began finding the decomposed or calcified bodies of young women and girls along the city’s desert outskirts—victims of a murder spree that has resulted in more than a hundred deaths so far, first in Juárez, but now, frighteningly, in other parts of Chihuahua state.

Among the first victims to be noticed in the crime pages of the local press was a thirteen-year-old girl from a poor background, Alma Chavira Farel, whose death is still used as the marker of the official count. Her corpse was found in January of 1993 in an empty lot in a middle-class neighborhood—she had been raped, beaten, and strangled, the brief news story said—but there is to this day no explanation of why a young girl’s violated body might have ended up in such a place. The following May, the body of another raped and strangled victim, name unknown, was found. She was discovered on the slopes of the Cerro Bola, a high hill with the words “Read the Bible” lettered on it, which overlooks Juárez. A third corpse appeared in June. This girl had been stabbed and set on fire. Another anonymous victim, found on the banks of the Rio Grande, had been raped, impaled, and knifed to death; her head had been bashed in. In 1993, Esther Chávez, who had recently founded a human-rights lobbying group and had a weekly column on feminist issues in the Juárez daily El Diario, read accounts of the murders in the paper’s crime pages. She began to take notice, keep count, and write about the killings. It was the first time that the murder of women in Juárez had been treated as an issue of public concern. It was years before the rest of the country paid attention.

I went to Chávez’s tidy middle-class home in Juárez late one afternoon to rummage through a few of the boxes of files she keeps in her study. The press clips made it clear that the victims were for the most part maquiladora workers, high-school students, and shop clerks. They were invariably young: the largest cluster of victims were between fifteen and twenty years old, and they were slender, dark-skinned, dark-haired, and pretty. Their most important characteristic, however, had to do with race and class: dark-skinned, long-haired young girls waiting at a bus stop or emerging from a factory are likely to come from families that are poor and nearly defenseless in a bureaucratic, overloaded, and user-hostile legal system. I found a dearth of credible suspects in the clips, or even police sketches of possible assailants, but there was a numbing quantity of photographs of victims’ relatives, holding banners and demanding justice in endless marches and demonstrations, or denouncing the offensive treatment they had themselves received at the hands of the police—the jokes, the laughter, the obscene insinuations about the victims’ secret lives. When I left her study, Chávez, a petite, even-tempered, and self-possessed woman of seventy, was in the living room in a favorite chair, nursing her daily treat of a whiskey-on-the-rocks. Since she began keeping track of the murders in Juárez, she has counted ninety-six “feminicides,” or sexual homicides—women whose deaths didn’t seem to be part of a larger wave of killings by husbands, pimps, gigolos, neighbors, stepfathers, and the like. The bodies of the victims—strangled or beaten to death, often raped and, sometimes, hideously mutilated—are found in the desert days or months after the girls fail to come home. Their faces are often disfigured, the skulls crushed. The autopsies sometimes reveal that they were kept alive for days before being killed. “You know, when I first started looking into these murders, and I found out how these girls had died, I didn’t sleep for days,” Chávez recalled. “I kept thinking about how, in their final hours, they must have prayed for death.” She pondered for a while. “I thought that it was just a question of getting the information out, so people would know what was happening, and then it would stop. I thought it would all be over after a few months. And now it’s ten years later and nothing has changed.”

Just three years ago, Mexican voters, electing a new President, decisively overturned a seventy-year-old authoritarian regime. The victor, Vicente Fox, has continued the policy started by his immediate predecessors, Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo, to greatly reduce federal power and devolve both tax monies and authority to the state and municipal levels. One result has been stronger local governments—or, where citizens are passive, stronger local rulers—and also a weakened Presidency. Vicente Fox, a gifted campaigner, as President has shown himself indifferent to the actual business of governing. Only after years of pleading by human-rights lobbying groups like the one founded by Esther Chávez in Juárez did the federal government agree, in July, to intervene in what it has long insisted was a purely local law-enforcement situation. In a damning special report issued in August, Amnesty International decried the lack of progress in human-rights issues in general under President Fox, and, in particular, the federal government’s mishandling of the unconscionably long list of Juárez murders. At the state level, the report focussed specifically on police indifference to the plight of victims’ families, a trail of confessions obtained through torture to gain questionable convictions, and incidents in which disfigured corpses have been returned to grieving parents—only to have the parents subsequently conclude that the corpse, though dressed in recognizable remnants of their daughter’s clothing, isn’t their daughter. Irene Kahn, the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, told me that the murders “are just one example of the failure of justice in Mexico. We see all the delays, torture, negligence, fabrication of evidence, open discrimination against women that we have seen in many other situations in Mexico, but here it’s very clear and blatant, and that’s why it’s so important. And it’s been going on for the last ten years.”

There are many theories about these killings. According to opinion polls, most Mexicans believe that the girls are murdered so that their organs can be extracted for transplants for wealthy patients in the United States. None of the recognizable remains found so far have been missing internal organs, but this theory has great symbolic weight. For many years, more serious speculation centered on an unnamed group of narcosatánicos, who might be using the girls in atrocious rituals. Recently, greater attention has been paid to the possibility that members of the various police forces are murdering the girls for sport. Perhaps, as some well-informed observers on both sides of the border believe, the killers are what are known as “Juniors,” scions of Mexico’s ruling élite, out on a hunting spree. No theory is sufficient to explain all the crimes, and none necessarily exclude the others. And, if all the theories seem inevitably to lead to paranoid and convoluted conclusions, it must be said that no theory is as demented as the crimes themselves. There is to date no legal evidence, in any case, pointing convincingly in any particular direction.

In Juárez, Manuel Esparza, who is the official spokesman for the Chihuahua investigative police—the judiciales—received me in a bare, uncomfortable office in the former Juárez police academy, not far from a stretch of desert where the bodies of eleven victims have been found over the years.

Esparza, who is surprisingly young—thirty-two—and garrulous, is also the chief of agents for the special investigative branch of the judiciales in charge of murders of women. He told me that since 1998, when Patricio Martínez was elected governor of Chihuahua and appointed Jesús Solís as his attorney general, police work has become in all ways more efficient. A map is being put together to match all the information about each victim with the site at which the body had been found. A special unit for crimes against women has been created. The F.B.I. has been invited to provide training and advice, and has done so.

The careers of Solís and Martínez have been linked at least since 1993, when Martínez was elected mayor of Chihuahua City and appointed Solís to head the municipal police. Published rumors regarding Solís’s possible involvement in the drug trade have hounded him (and been angrily denied) since then, and over the years numerous complaints have been filed accusing him of participating directly in acts of police brutality against the citizenry.

According to Esparza, one serial murderer, or an association of murderers, was responsible for twenty-five of the crimes in Juárez to date. Even though it is well known that serial killers are hard to find, Esparza said, his people had arrested all the criminals involved in those twenty-five murders. The other murders, he went on, including the recent ones, could be attributed to imitators.

The most notorious arrest took place in 1995, three years before Martínez’s election, when Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, an Egyptian resident of Juárez with a long arrest record in the United States for assault and battery of women, was accused of seven of the Juárez murders. He was tried in 1999, and in the end convicted only of one, the murder of seventeen-year-old Elisabeth Castro. In the view of human-rights activists and journalists who have examined the Sharif trial record, there is no substantial evidence linking him to Elizabeth Castro’s murder—a conclusion that Amnesty International concurs in. Sharif, throughout his years of imprisonment, has insisted that he is innocent.

In 1999, with Governor Martínez and Attorney General Solís in power, a thirteen-year-old girl managed to escape from a bus driver, employed on one of the maquiladora routes, who had tried to rape and kill her. He and some of his fellow-drivers were subsequently accused of killing several young women on Sharif’s orders (the prosecution argues that Sharif, who was in jail at the time, commissioned the murders in order to prove his own innocence), but these cases, too, seem to be full of holes, and none of the accused have been sentenced. Just last month, Sharif was charged with seven more of the Juárez murders—also carried out from jail under his orders, the accusation says.

Two years ago, two other bus drivers were detained and accused of killing eight young girls whose bodies had been found days earlier near a well-travelled avenue in Juárez. The suspects were not allowed to talk at their perp walk, but they removed their clothing to reveal burn marks and bruises, which the prison medical examiner subsequently identified as evidence of torture. When the press questioned an official from the attorney general’s office about this, he explained that the wounds had been self-inflicted. One of the drivers died in custody in February. His lawyer, Mario Escobedo Anaya, who was outspoken in his denial of his client’s guilt, had been killed by police a year earlier; the officers involved said that they had confused the lawyer with a fugitive criminal, though it is not clear why they would have. (Escobedo Anaya was talking to his father on his cell phone at the time of the shooting.) The police were cleared of all charges a few months later, on the ground that they had acted in self-defense. Innocent or not, the surviving bus driver, after three years in jail, still has not been sentenced.

The media and the human-rights activists who monitor these cases had assumed that the killings of young girls were a phenomenon defined by the Juárez border mentality, its transient and economically deprived population, and a burgeoning drug culture. Then the killings spread from Juárez to the capital. In the past four years, fifteen young women and teen-age girls have disappeared in broad daylight from the streets of Chihuahua City, having been last seen leaving the maquiladoras in which they worked, or the schools where they studied, or their homes to go shopping. Nine corpses have been found in the mesquite desert around the city, strangled and disfigured and possibly raped, and police say they have identified six of them.

On Sunday, March 16th, at about four in the afternoon, a Chihuahua City labor leader named José Rayas dropped off his daughter Viviana at a park near the city’s downtown area, where she was going to do homework with some classmates. Viviana, a quiet, thin, and childish-looking sixteen-year-old with long dark hair and big Mexican eyes, was last seen by her classmates an hour and a half later as they left her at a bus stop near the park. When her parents returned home from a family visit at eight o’clock that evening, they learned that she hadn’t come home.

José Rayas is a stocky man with sad eyes whose face and body seem to be puddling at the bottom. His voice is soft, he wears no diamond jewelry or gold chains, and his demeanor is modest. In other words, he does not look like what he is: the general secretary of the Chihuahua section of the Workers’ Union of the Communications and Transport Ministry—which controls the nation’s highways and airports and its radio and television networks. Before the murder of Viviana Rayas, the killers had preyed on poor families, but her case was different: in a state that is about as large as Oregon and has barely three million inhabitants, and whose numerous foreign-assembly factories rely on an efficient and well-maintained highway network, Viviana Rayas’s father is an extremely powerful individual, and one skilled in playing hardball.

Viviana was the youngest and most cosseted of José Rayas’s three daughters. He and his wife, Columba Arellanes de Rayas, called her Baby, until she begged them to stop, and they switched to Bibis. They doted on her delicate ways and her love of poetry. After her disappearance, Rayas hardly bothered with the police; he mobilized his entire union chapter instead. Truck drivers reported any suspicious movement along the highways, repairmen in the city set up lookout posts, investigators fanned out through the downtown area chasing even the flimsiest clues. Mostly, Rayas told me, he concentrated on a string of anonymous phone calls that started after he went on television to ask for help in finding his daughter. He followed through on every tip. Young women called to turn in their estranged boyfriends. Children denounced strict parents. On the face of it, the police were coöperative: Rayas says that they hardly ever came up with their own leads, but they always investigated whatever information he supplied. In the long weeks between Viviana’s disappearance and the day he was called to the morgue to identify the body, Rayas had dozens of people interrogated or detained on the basis of anonymous tips.

Not one of the leads panned out. Rayas invited the members of Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, or Justice for Our Daughters—a small women’s group that has aggressively and effectively called attention to the murders in Chihuahua City—to participate in a May Day parade, in which, according to Mexican custom, all labor organizations march past the balcony of the highest local authority, in this case Governor Martínez. For the event, Rayas had five hundred yellow T-shirts emblazoned with Viviana’s photograph and the words “Help me find her,” and distributed them among the paraders. Governor Martínez, presiding over the march, at one point shouted to Lucha Castro, an activist lawyer and one of the founders of Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, that she get a real job, and “stop profiteering with the mothers’ pain.” He did not address Rayas directly, but it may be that the march influenced his decision, on a weekly radio broadcast, to refer to members of Rayas’s union who had left loose gravel on a highway as “assassins.” The remark was widely reported.

Perhaps, too, the radio incident had something to do with the vehemence of Rayas’s growing conviction that the government was sabotaging his efforts to find his daughter. By the time of the May Day parade, both Rayas and his wife, who works in the cafeteria of the public high school where Viviana was enrolled, were frantic. An anonymous caller who spoke “as if he were talking through a voice distorter” told Rayas that if his wife would consent to dress as a prostitute and walk around the red-light district he would see to it that their daughter was released. Twice, Columba complied. Another caller said that on the evening of March 16th her eleven- and twelve-year-old sons had seen a young girl they subsequently recognized from press photographs as Viviana sitting in a pickup truck, apparently fighting with a young man. The girl was crying, and looked as if she wanted to get out of the truck. Rayas notified the police; later, they told him that nothing had come of the lead.

One evening in late March, an unusually savvy informant, who announced that she was calling from a phone booth in order to avoid the caller I.D. on Rayas’s phone, told him that he should check out a store in the downtown area: the owners were a strange, long-haired couple covered with tattoos who sold hippie jewelry. Their store stayed open until all hours, and perverted things seemed to be going on there; one of the owners, Ulises Perzábal, liked to take photographs of the young girls who went to the shop, the caller said. Rayas contacted the police.

Like Sharif, the major suspect in the Juárez murders, who has dark skin and peaked eyebrows, Ulises Perzábal, with his long hair and jewelry and tattoos and scraggly beard, looks the part. Like Sharif, Perzábal, who is forty-five, could be difficult: ordinarily a peaceful and sociable man who waved to his neighbors and chatted with whoever dropped by the store (in contrast to Cynthia, who is always described as a quiet presence behind the counter), he had moods. When I talked to him briefly at the Chihuahua state prison, he was sweetly cheerful and then suddenly hyper and conspiratorial. “This isn’t about a murder,” he said. “It’s an attack on our politics. We’re in the eye of the eagle, man! In the eye of the eagle!” He irritated Chihuahuenses with his endless harangues and fixations and exhortations. He was obsessed with a return to a noble Aztec past and lectured his hapless audiences on the need to improve their brains by eating more beans—or so his listeners recall. He sang rather tuneless protest songs, accompanying himself on a guitar, and had been a fixture of the small, sporadic radical demonstrations held around town. Eventually, he was no longer invited, because he tended to drive audiences away.

Perhaps none of this was important when the police weighed whether to question him or not. What really counted was the fact that, like Sharif, he had been arrested in the past for a sexual offense. In 2001, at a time when Cynthia was travelling, he had had a brief affair with a minor, and her family filed suit. (“He probably thought he was the rock star and she was his groupie,” someone who knows him well said.) The family dropped all charges two months later, but the record stayed (and Cynthia moved out for a time). After Viviana Rayas’s father received the anonymous phone call and reported him to the police, Ulises Perzábal was detained on four occasions, beaten, and interrogated by judiciales regarding the murder of Viviana and the other disappeared girls from Chihuahua. After the fourth detention, Perzábal sought out Miguel Zapién de la Torre, the lawyer who had represented him when he was arrested in 2001. Zapién and his law partner, Adrián Alzate, filed for an order of protection from police harassment, and the cops left Perzábal alone for several weeks.

There were fewer leads for José Rayas to follow after the judiciales appeared to turn their attention away from Ulises Perzábal. The Rayas family remained convinced that Viviana had been abducted, and not simply run away. She went home after school with her mother every day. She loved to write, and her grades were good—she had recently got the equivalent of an A-plus on one of her poems. She had “little friends,” who, according to her father, were allowed to court her only in the safety of the Rayas home. Her father had seen a large pink cross that Lucha Castro and other activists erected two years ago in front of Governor Martínez’s office. There was a nail embedded in it for each of the Juárez and Chihuahua victims. On May 26th, at the climax of yet another demonstration, José Rayas addressed the Governor’s controversial attorney general directly.

Initially, Rayas had intended simply to marshal his union brethren and some of the women activists for one more walk to the Governor’s office, he says. But as they prepared to set out he and his friends looked around and asked each other, “Which way should we go?” They decided to take a longer, less direct route that took in a busy downtown street where fruits and vegetables are sold. On the way, bystanders joined the procession, and by the time the marchers had passed the fruit and vegetable stalls and returned, nearly a hundred women—shoppers and venders both—were walking behind them. Rayas and his fellows led the demonstration to Attorney General Solís’s offices and there called a halt. Rayas knew the controversial Solís well enough to call him by his nickname. “Chito!” he yelled over a megaphone. “Give me back my daughter! I know you know where she is!”

In the union’s headquarters recently, Rayas explained to me what he had meant by this statement. “I am the head of my family, and I know where my children are at all times,” he said. “As attorney general, Solís has the obligation to know what is going on in the state of Chihuahua.” But those who heard him at the time interpreted the challenge differently: Rayas’s listeners seem to have felt that he was in some way accusing Solís of playing a role in the murders.

Beneath Solís’s window, Rayas issued an ultimatum: either his daughter was found, and those responsible for her fate were arrested, or he would see to it that all the road workers in the state walked off the job, including the toll-booth operators, who collect a significant portion of Chihuahua’s highway income. Two days later, around noon, the head of the Attorney General’s Special Office for the Investigation of Sex Crimes and Crimes Against the Family, a woman named Rocío Sáenz, phoned Rayas at work and told him that two women who were on their way to a local pilgrimage site had spotted a body some five kilometres off a desert highway and called the police. Sáenz asked Rayas to come to the morgue to identify it. The following evening, Cynthia Kiecker and Ulises Perzábal were taken to the former police academy for two days of intense interrogation. Then they were formally charged with the murder and shown to the press.

Through the glass separation wall of the visiting room in the Chihuahua women’s prison center, Cynthia Kiecker, who is forty-four, doesn’t look like a hippie kid anymore. Her skin has been raked by the sun, her mouth drawn thin by tension. But there is still an emotional haziness about her—and a lack of anger—that could have been the product of traumatic reaction but seemed to me more likely the result of a generally dreamy and benevolent view of the world. Often in our conversations, I felt like shouting, “Listen up! Focus! Don’t you realize you’re in terrible trouble?” But I could imagine that in a different situation—as she offered a slice of home-baked banana bread to a visitor to the shop, say, or gazed at her husband while he sang and played the guitar—there would be a graceful charm in the seemingly willful vagueness.

Why, if she was now insisting that she and Ulises were innocent, had she confessed to murder? “I held out as long as possible, but I didn’t know how far they would go with my husband,” she said. “The only thing I was sure of is that I wouldn’t make it out of there alive.” During the forty-eight hours that the couple’s de-facto abduction lasted, they had been kicked and beaten repeatedly, she said. Every once in a while, someone would throw a bucket of water over Cynthia’s shirt, and then apply electric shocks to her back and legs. The one concession her guards had made in those two days was to remove the plastic hood so that she could breathe more easily. Eventually, she told me, several of the couple’s friends and acquaintances were brought in, and they were tortured, too. Ulises was held separately. At the end of the second day, Cynthia was taken to see Ulises. He was naked and badly beaten, she said. Electric shocks had been applied to his back and genitals repeatedly throughout those forty-eight hours. “And they had tried to stretch me out on a cot,” Cynthia told me, “and they threatened to rape me, and they said, ‘We’re going to shove this stick up your ass’ and”—her voice trailed off—“oh . . . all that stuff. And then I saw Ulises”—here for the first time her voice quavered—“and he said to sign, just go along with the story, and it sounded to me like the best solution.”

Cynthia testified that on Sunday, March 16th, around 5:30 p.m., after closing down the store, she and Ulises headed home to get ready for a party at which they would listen to rock music and drink tea that she likes to make from peyote. (Cynthia said that the confession was videotaped while several judiciales and Sáenz observed the proceedings out of camera range.) She said that on the way home the couple ran into Viviana Rayas, a young girl who had at some point bought rings or bracelets at the store, and that Ulises invited her to the party. Cynthia then testified that after drinking the peyote tea she became jealous of Ulises and Viviana and quarrelled with her husband; that Viviana became sick from the effects of the tea and fell, injuring herself, that Ulises “andaba bien loco”—was acting pretty crazy—and that sometime after 9 p.m. he grabbed the short iron rod that jewelers use to size rings and struck Viviana once on the back of the head.

In Ulises’s confession, which differs from Cynthia’s in some critical respects, he narrates at length how he had befriended Viviana long before the night of the murder and how he had decided to prepare a special “ritual” for her, inspired by her “Aztec features.” At the party that evening, during which the “energizing ritual” would take place, and at which abundant quantities of cocaine and marijuana were consumed, he prepared the peyote tea. Viviana became ill, Ulises became solicitous, and Cynthia became jealous and, in an uncontrollable rage, attacked first Viviana and then Ulises with a baseball bat, then with a rebar, and finally with the ring sizer. At some point, Cynthia let up on Ulises, but then Ulises, “pursued by rage and confusion,” was moved to strike Viviana himself. (The initial forensic report on Viviana’s body lists the cause of death not as a blow to the head but as “crushed vertebrae due to violent strangulation,” which is consistent with many of the previous feminicides.) Realizing that Viviana was dead, the statement goes on, Ulises, his wife, and three friends took the body out to the desert, dumped it, and covered it with a sheet of metal roofing. And then Cynthia and Ulises drove their accomplices home.

Whether the authorities who took down the statements were troubled by any of the striking discrepancies between the two accounts—however they may have been obtained in the first place—is not known. The friends who had been hauled in as witnesses signed approximately similar versions of the events at the Perzábal home on the evening of March 16th, and then were released.

Cynthia and Ulises were transferred to the state prison, just outside Chihuahua City, where their arrest was announced to the media. Cynthia says it was a huge relief to be in jail: “I felt safe: I was somewhere where the judiciales couldn’t come and get me. Only prison guards are allowed in here.” A few days later, having seen the stories about the narcosatánica Cynthia Kiecker in the local press, the United States consul stationed in Juárez came to visit. His assistant lent Kiecker a cell phone, and Kiecker called her family.

In Chihuahua City, I talked to Manuel López, one of four acquaintances of the Perzábals who testified against them. López makes his living sketching pencil portraits of passersby on the streets of downtown Chihuahua, and was not really a friend of the couple, but they had been kind to him, agreeing to show some of his work on consignment at the store. Once, when he couldn’t pay the rent in the transient hotel where he was living, they took him in for a couple of weeks. López has astonishingly light-colored blue-green eyes and a haunted, even terrified expression. How prosecutors found him is a mystery, but he says that he was taken to the former police academy the same night as the Perzábals and beaten for hours. He signed a witness statement and got out of town, but when the Perzábals’ lawyers, Zapién and Alzate, found him, he agreed to retract his statement at the trial. López feared for his life, he told me, and to judge by his startled movements and trembling hands he was not exaggerating. He has no family, no fixed address; who would care if he was discreetly disposed of?

Still, he was willing to recant. After Zapién and Alzate brought him back to Chihuahua, and after the trial judge refused to set a date to hear López’s retraction, the lawyers called a press conference at which López and another acquaintance of the Perzábals both spoke. “I used to see Cynthia and Ulises in the news every day after I denounced them, and I would cry,” López told me. “When I came back and talked to the press, I felt at peace again.” Immediately after the press conference, a white helicopter began hovering over the two lawyers’ downtown offices. Six other partners at the firm quickly moved out, and Zapién and Alzate had to vacate the premises, at their landlord’s request. They decided to send López into hiding.

The press conference at which López spoke seems to have marked a turning point for José Rayas. The more carefully he looked at the state’s case against the Perzábals, the more he began to wonder if the real killers were still at large. Rayas has wielded power and dealt with the state for many years, but when I talked to him he seemed curiously innocent and forlorn, as if during the preceding weeks he had been robbed not only of his daughter but of all certainty. His doubts now extend even to the identification of his daughter’s body; among the many large issues facing the officials dealing with the Chihuahua feminicides, perhaps none is more confounding than the question of why they have, on several occasions, turned over to a grieving family what appears to have been the wrong body. In the case of the two bus drivers accused of murdering eight young girls in 2001, DNA tests did not match samples taken from the relatives of five of the girls the suspects had named. Two tests were inconclusive, and only one body tested positive, according to Oscar Maynez, who was then the head of the Juárez forensic department. Maynez told me that he had refused to plant some of the bus drivers’ hair as evidence, and that he simultaneously resigned and was fired a few weeks later.

In another instance, the mother of a seventeen-year-old Juárez victim named Sagrario González demanded that a DNA test be performed in Mexico City on the body that the police had delivered as her daughter’s, and the results revealed that the dead girl was no relation. When the mother insisted on an exhumation of the girl’s remains, police managed to dig up the wrong coffin. In the case in which Sharif was convicted, the family of Elisabeth Castro received a corpse, dressed in Elisabeth’s clothing, that was approximately five feet four inches tall; Elisabeth was five feet seven. More recently, in Chihuahua City, Patricia Cervantes, the mother of Neyra Azucena Cervantes, refused to accept the body offered to her by the prosecuting attorney’s office, and continues to claim her daughter as missing.

At the morgue in Chihuahua City, judiciales and Sáenz showed Rayas and his two older daughters a number of garments displayed in a long glass case. Rayas didn’t recognize many, but a blouse, a brassiere, and a short jacket were undoubtedly his daughter’s. Sáenz showed him photographs of a corpse, swollen and bruised from the waist down, a skeleton from the waist up. Did he recognize Viviana? he was asked. Rayas fumbled for words. A dentist was brought in, and she told Rayas—as she told the press shortly afterward—that she had filled two of Viviana’s molars back in October, and that she recognized the teeth. Would you like to see the body? Rayas was asked, and was told that he could spare himself a great deal of pain if he identified his daughter from the photographs alone. Rayas decided that he would rather remember Viviana as she had been in life. He signed the identification warrant and authorized the burial.

For weeks, Miguel Zapién pleaded with the Rayas family to authorize an exhumation of the body. Viviana’s mother was so horrified by the request that she stood guard over the grave. And yet José Rayas’s doubts have grown: a bloodstain on the Perzábals’ wall turned out to be maroon-colored vinyl paint; according to dates that appear in court records, police notified a ranch owner that a body had been found on his property the day before the two women stumbled onto it and called the police. In the original press story reporting the discovery of a corpse, a spokesman for the judiciales denied that it could be any of the missing girls; it belonged to an older woman, he said. Two days after the Perzábals’ arrest, Rayas had taken a video camera out to the area where Viviana was supposedly found, and filmed Ulises Perzábal as he demonstrated to some judiciales how he had dumped the victim’s body. In the video Rayas showed me, Perzábal is limping badly, and when the judiciales realize that they are being filmed they form a shield around him. In July, Perzábal phoned Rayas from jail to tell him that he was innocent. On August 5th, Rayas agreed at last to meet with Zapién and with Cynthia’s mother, Carol Kiecker, who, with her former husband, Burton, and other family members, takes turns travelling to Chihuahua to visit Cynthia in jail.

The Perzábals’ prosecutors may have found it surprising that a middle-aged hippie turned out to have such loving and protective parents. The Kieckers come from Bloomington, Minnesota—Carol is a retired vice-president of a major West Coast H.M.O., Burton is in real estate—and José Rayas, too, may have been inclined to see Cynthia and Ulises Perzábal in a more favorable light after talking to them.

Carol Kiecker has a lively gaze, a face that, like her body, is comfortably rounded at the edges, and a fast, purposeful stride. She is sixty-eight, and anything but unfocussed. When she retired, a few years ago, she took up backpacking, and since then has travelled in Ghana, Togo, and Benin, and along the Silk Road in China. Before her amicable divorce from Burton, in 1983, the couple and their three children vacationed in Mexico many times, and she can speak a little Spanish.

Carol Kiecker appears to have thought that the drug-murder-by-bludgeoning episode involving her daughter would soon be declared a mistake by the Mexican justice system—President Fox had already heard about Cynthia’s travails from a few Minnesota congressmen and both senators, thanks to the family’s efforts—and that Cynthia and Ulises would then be released. But Carol now stays in a budget hotel in Chihuahua and eats her meals at modest restaurants, because she has begun to see that the trial may turn out differently, or at least take much longer than she ever feared. The full impact of Cynthia’s situation seems to have descended on Carol the day that her daughter and Ulises were scheduled to testify for the first time. By then, Carol had learned enough about the Mexican legal system to know that there is no such thing as a jury trial, that the court session would take place in private, before a presiding judge and a transcriber, and that the proceedings might take a long time (though not, it must be said, by the standards of the woefully laggard Mexican justice system, in which prisoners can wait in jail for years for their first trial date). Testimony in the Perzábal trial was scheduled to begin on Friday, August 8th, with Cynthia’s interrogation to be followed by Ulises’s. Manuel López and a friend of the Perzábals who had also been detained with them were scheduled to retract their confessions the following day. Carol expected to be given access to the sessions; she was not aware that third parties—especially the press—might not be allowed in. There were only a few reporters there in any event: a British television crew, an A.P. reporter from the Mexico City bureau, and me. There were no local press people except for a couple of eager kids from a tiny radical periodical.

A few minutes after the hearing was supposed to begin, Zapién was called into the office of Judge Bernardino Medina. Zapién, who is thirty-four, is reserved and polite in an old-fashioned, provincial sort of way, and, in the perishing Chihuahua heat, wears blue suits and immaculate white shirts without breaking a sweat. He is personable but not quite handsome, and he could probably be convincing before a trial jury, I thought, were there ever to be such a thing in Mexico. But when he emerged from the Judge’s chambers half an hour later he was furious. He said that the Judge had rescheduled the session for the following Monday, perhaps mindful that by then the journalists who had flown into town to cover the trial would be gone.

Carol Kiecker was unusually quiet, suddenly looking older and struggling to regain the chirpy poise that in previous days had allowed her to take on with aplomb foreign laws and lawyers, hundred-degree-plus temperatures, and press interrogations. But when the trial resumed, under a different judge, a few days later (Zapién had demanded and, astonishingly, obtained a change of venue), Carol was back on form. She and Zapién had met with José Rayas, and he had agreed to consider the family’s request that he appear as a witness for the defense at the trial.

The witnesses were permitted to retract their confessions on August 15th, and on August 25th Rayas appeared before the court. He stated that he did not believe the Perzábals had murdered his daughter, and he said that he and his wife had agreed to authorize an exhumation of the corpse so that a DNA sample could be taken. Even if the body Rayas and his wife buried does turn out to be Viviana’s, the family’s pain will never find relief. Like dozens of other families who have lost a daughter during the last ten years in the state of Chihuahua, they may never believe that justice has been done, that the government has thoroughly prosecuted the crime of their disappeared child and arrested the murderer. José Rayas may never find out what happened to his daughter when he dropped her off at the park that afternoon—and, indeed, it may be better for him if he never does. As for Cynthia and Ulises Perzábal, long months and numerous judicial procedures lie ahead of them before they are sentenced or acquitted by the presiding judge. Meanwhile, on September 7th the body of another girl was found on the outskirts of Chihuahua City. ♦